“I received several private letters and printed notices of ’Our Old Home’ from England.  It is laughable to see the innocent wonder with which they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice, insanity, jealousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting the least suspicion that there may be a particle of truth in them.  The monstrosity of their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimited admiration impresses them as malicious caricature.  But they do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them.  I would as soon hate my own people.

“Tell Ticknor that I want a hundred dollars more, and I suppose I shall keep on wanting more and more till the end of my days.  If I subside into the almshouse before my intellectual faculties are quite extinguished, it strikes me that I would make a very pretty book out of it; and, seriously, if I alone were concerned, I should not have any great objection to winding up there.”

On the 14th of November came a pleasant little note from him, which seemed to have been written in better spirits than he had shown of late.  Photographs of himself always amused him greatly, and in the little note I refer to there is this pleasant passage:—­

    “Here is the photograph,—­a grandfatherly old figure enough; and I
    suppose that is the reason why you select it.

“I am much in want of cartes de visite to distribute on my own account, and am tired and disgusted with all the undesirable likenesses as yet presented of me.  Don’t you think I might sell my head to some photographer who would be willing to return me the value in small change; that is to say, in a dozen or two of cards?”

The first part of Chapter I. of “The Dolliver Romance” came to me from the Wayside on the 1st of December.  Hawthorne was very anxious to see it in type as soon as possible, in order that he might compose the rest in a similar strain, and so conclude the preliminary phase of Dr. Dolliver.  He was constantly imploring me to send him a good pen, complaining all the while that everything had failed him in that line.  In one of his notes begging me to hunt him up something that he could write with, he says:—­

    “Nobody ever suffered more from pens than I have, and I am glad that
    my labor with the abominable little tool is drawing to a close.”

In the month of December Hawthorne attended the funeral of Mrs. Franklin Pierce, and, after the ceremony, came to stay with us.  He seemed ill and more nervous than usual.  He said he found General Pierce greatly needing his companionship, for he was overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his wife.  I well remember the sadness of Hawthorne’s face when he told us he felt obliged to look on the dead.  “It was,” said he, “like a carven image laid in its richly embossed enclosure, and there was a remote expression about it as if the whole had nothing to do with things present.”  He told us, as an instance of the ever-constant courtesy of his friend General Pierce, that while they were standing at the grave, the General, though completely overcome with his own sorrow, turned and drew up the collar of Hawthorne’s coat to shield him from the bitter cold.